JAL Card

By implementing Identity Manager and SecureLogin, JAL Card effectively bullet-proofed its system with a centralised approach to identity management.

About JAL Card

Established in 1982, JAL Card, a Japan Airlines subsidiary, is Japan's leading airline credit card company and mileage club. Like its parent company, JAL Card is known for its superior customer service. JAL Card's 500 employees cater to more than 1.5 million members worldwide.

Challenge

As a credit card company, JAL Card needs to ensure that the identities of its customers and its data are secure at all times. Following a companywide audit, JAL Card realised that its identity management system was in need of an overhaul. Employees had multiple identities with different formats and often used five to eight passwords to access order entry, credit management and finance applications. Concern mounted within the JAL Card IT group that the company's fragmented identity management system could pose a serious security risk.

JAL Card also wanted to use the opportunity to address compliance issues in anticipation of new requirements. With Japanese legislators already reviewing Sarbanes-Oxley legislation in the United States, JAL Card anticipated that it was only a matter of time before similar legislation would be passed in Japan. The company wanted to be prepared.

In addition, the JAL Card IT team feared that the company's reputation for quality service was at risk. Customer service representatives were spending more time trying to resolve IT issues than focusing on customers and JAL Card IT staff were spending about 20 percent of their time attending to identity management issues—time that they could have been using to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as customer relationship management.

Solution

To address its need to increase security and compliance capabilities, JAL Card implemented Identity Manager and SecureLogin. JAL Card's long time IT partner, TIS, a consultancy with more than 30 years of systems development for credit card and financing companies, helped implement the identity management solution.

"We wanted to address our identity management challenges quickly and comprehensively," said Masaaki Mine, assistant director of systems planning at JAL Card. "Novell (now a part of Micro Focus) successfully addressed our need for centralised, secure and systematic management, and also provided us with a technology platform that can serve both our current and future identity management needs."

Identity Manager enabled JAL Card to simplify the process of identity management. With Identity Manager, the IT staff have automated user provisioning and password management throughout the user lifecycle—delivering immediate access for new users, modifying or rescinding access as necessary across all systems, and synchronising multiple passwords into a single strong password.

With Identity Manager, JAL Card reduced its user administration costs by eliminating complex manual processes and enforcing security enterprise-wide—all while delivering the right resources to users so that they can focus on better serving customers.

SecureLogin provides employees with single sign-on to corporate resources and has substantially reduced helpdesk costs. SecureLogin has also improved user satisfaction by dramatically reducing the amount of time required for users to log in to applications, enabling them to be more productive.

"We are a very client-focused IT organisation and could not risk imposing an unfriendly system on our 500 internal clients," said Mine. "Novell helped us meet all our goals by enabling us to have greater control over application usage and bolster security, while at the same time helping us to provide users with quick and easy single sign-on capabilities."

Results

Since implementing our solution, JAL Card has received rave reviews from employees who no longer have to remember multiple passwords to access applications. The company reduced the number of passwords per user from eight to one, dramatically simplifying identity management across most of the company's core applications.

The SecureLogin interface has dramatically simplified user administration. The IT team can easily grant application access according to user or group, and can set viewing and editing capabilities for each user.

"Single sign-on with SecureLogin was instrumental to improving end-user satisfaction, "said Mine. "We've gone from having multiple identities with disparate formats to having a single user ID and password for each user. We have received positive responses from our clients and reduced the amount of time spent on administration by 50 percent."

By implementing a strategic platform for identity management and addressing its security concerns in a comprehensive way, JAL Card has set the foundation for J-SOX compliance, Japan's version of Sarbanes-Oxley which will go into effect in April 2008.

"With single sign-on and our identity management platform, we are first-stage compliant with J-SOX," said Mine. "We will continue to build on our current system and move toward full compliance as 2008 approaches. We look forward to our continued work with Novell."